Month: October 2017

Here’s something you don’t often hear about, a tech company just raised $25 million in a Series E fundraising venture.

Recorded Future just so happens to be a threat intelligence service that has a pretty unique niche if you will.

The firm monitors the dark web looking to find intel on up and coming cyber attacks as well as help to locate your stolen information should it have been stolen at some point in the cyber world.

If you don’t have any background on the dark web, we’ll just stick with the basics, it’s the place where criminals like to meet up at in the cyber world of course.

The dark web is more often than not difficult to navigate which is what makes Recorded Future so unique in what it does, they actually have found much better ways of navigating through the dark web and finding stuff than our own government does.

What’s more is now that they have raised this $25 million they can offer their services to more than just the government and financial sector.

Criminals utilize the dark web to plan cyber attacks, some use it to plan actual coordinated in person attacks, yes as in terror attacks, sadly a lot of stolen intel ends up on the dark web such as social security numbers, banking information, child porn, victims are more easily trafficked on the dark web.

And once all of that ends up on the dark web, it ends up being sold.

That does not always guarantee an arrest will be made however, sometimes tracking some of these guys down can prove even more difficult than actually navigating the dark web.

It is nice to see a company rising up however and attempting to do more about the dark web than our own government has been able to do the last 5+ years.

Share this:

Like this:

Today was a rather interesting day for Trump and his former campaign team all while Trump is happily and quite delusionally tweeting that still, no proof of a Collusion with Russia exists.

Here’s the rundown:

Special Counsel and former FBI Director, Robert S. Mueller III this morning announced charges against 3 former Trump campaign officials:

– Former campaign chairman Paul Manafort

– Paul Manafort’s longtime business partner Rick Gates

Both of which were charged in a 12-count indictment with and this is so not shocking, conspiracy to launder money, making false statements along with a sprinkling of other charges in connection with their work “advising” a Russia-friendly political party in Ukraine.

These two gems plead not guilty, which again is not a shock, who pleads guilty to money laundering when the very money you laundered can help to buy your way out of the judicial system in this country?

-Former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who by the way casually admitted to making a false statement to FBI investigators when asked about his contact with a foreigner claiming to have high-level Russian connections.

Court records indicate that George made rather extensive efforts to try to broker connections with Russian Officials and he tried to arrange a meeting of some sorts between them and the Trump Campaign.

Sort of makes you wonder how much longer the faerie tale that Trump likes to tell will actually continue on, in that Trump and his team were only “attempting” to meet with Russian Officials to talk about real estate and casual business talk of course but nothing whatsoever to do with the election…nothing-at-all.

All in all, not a bad day’s work for Robert and his team, the biggest question of all here is whether or not this will put him one step closer to actually proving Trump was himself involved with or knew about any of it personally.

The other positive, the more members of Trump’s illustrious team Robert takes out the chances of just one bird singing will actually increase because Robert does not mess around, if you fall onto his radar with the tiniest spec of something, he will in fact come after you, with evidence to back up whatever it is he intends on charging you with.

You don’t have to take my word for it, the man’s track record pretty much speaks for itself.

And as the investigation continues it only serves to bring him one step closer to Trump and Trump should at the very least be aware of that. Yet he continues to send out tweets that are completely speculative and designed only to misinform the public, in his favor of course.

Either way, if Robert doesn’t get Trump on this, rest assured, Trump is pretty good all on his own of digging his own grave.

Score for score, this move makes Robert S Mueller III more powerful than Trump, and Trump has got to be hating that right this very moment.

Share this:

Like this:

“He was in the world’s only armless sculptor. He put the chisel in his mount and his wife hit him on the back of the head with a mallet.” Fed Allen

Trump just can’t help himself when it comes to taking to twitter to let the world know just how he feels about something and today’s lovers quarrel is no different for Trump.

Trump decided to take to twitter and upset Michael Moore by tweeting:

“While not at all presidential I must point out that the Sloppy Michael Moore Show on Broadway was a TOTAL BOMB and was forced to close. Sad!”

As you might well imagine, that inspired Michael to come back with quite a zinger of his own:

“You must have my smash hit of a Broadway show confused with your presidency — which IS a total bomb and WILL indeed close early. NOT SAD.”

To be fair, I am guessing that Trump was just waiting for the opportunity to hit Michael where it might hurt because earlier this summer Michael did happen to announced that he was working on a movie about Trump, titled “Fahrenheit 11/9.”

If anyone has seen any of Michael’s works in the past, I don’t have to tell you that it’s a given that Trump isn’t going to like the guy and will look for anything that he can so as to possibly use in an effort to discredit anything he might say or in this case put into a movie.

It’s also pretty important to know that Michael is in fact a liberal and he has not been quiet about his opposition to Trump being our nation’s leader.

At any rate, I am just glad to see that Trump was able to tweet something which lead off by admitting to the fact that it was not all that presidential.

Now if we could just get him to lead into everything he tweets, says or does every day, that would be a step in the right direction.

One thing is for sure, the lovers quarrel between Trump and Michael Moore is far from over.

Share this:

Like this:

Investigators had been hopeful to glean some knowledge from a search of the Las Vegas shooters hard drive, to their shock, it seems to have gone missing.

Not that the investigators ever had of course, they never did. They suspect that it had been removed prior to the mass shooting.

Authorities also noted that some type of file erasing software had been purchased by the shooter prior to the shooting as well. No one is sure if it had been used or not.

It does seem rather interesting that the hard drive is missing and some software that was designed to erase hardware had been purchased.

Then again, both things could actually turn out to be absolutely nothing, something the shooter planned so as to mislead investigators into thinking he had something on his hard drive that he really, really wanted to hide.

We live in a very tech savvy society, people keep everything on laptops, tablets, phones, however more often than not unless someone’s set this up for them, most average, single, 64 year old males are a bit reluctant to just put everything online, hence they are highly unlikely to have created any type of a manifesto on a laptop.

What’s more is that missing manifesto are a trend these days, mass shooters simply are not leaving behind a reason for why, a better understanding into who and what they are and were.

Investigators often times do still find things regardless of age, that are helpful in the investigation for instance, did someone help him, know about it and not say anything etc.

In this shooters case, he knew exactly what he was doing, for each irrational thought, he had one rational to match it.

He wasn’t stupid, he was a numbers guy, they are deep thinkers and in my experience, they plan detail, after detail with absolute perfection. They can’t do it any other way, it has to be that way.

I am leaning towards the family here, one brother was arrested on suspicion of child porn, but the other brother this Eric, I see something pretty intriguing and if it were me investigating, I would study that very carefully.

We may never fully know the motive for that deadly night October 1, 2017, sometimes that is a very bitter pill to swallow, yet having a better understanding of what was in the mind of the shooter helps us prevent shootings such as these in the future.

Share this:

Like this:

First can I just ask who in God’s name is naming some of this ransomware because dubbing the newest attack “Bad Rabbit” gives me nightmares about a horror movie I once saw as a child from 1972 entitled “Night of the Lepus.”

This newest attack has already hit Russia and Ukraine and according to US officials, this newest attack has hit several other countries in addition to Russia and Ukraine, they have seen it hit Germany, Poland, South Korea and Turkey as well, so far.

News reports from the US are currently filtering in, slowly but the attack has in fact hit the United States, no word yet on how many have been affected.

Since the majority of the victims from this attack as it stands as of right now have been in Russia, it is fair to assume that Russia may have been the intended target here.

It does actually bare some pretty eerie similarities to WannaCry and Peyta, Malware analyst Amit Serper, principal security researcher of Cybereason, did happen to release a tweet with instructions for stopping the attack from happening.

I almost hate to say it here, I have just one very small suspicion that this might be the work of some government somewhere in the world that simply wants to prove a point.

Bad Rabbit is for sure coming to a country near you sooner rather than later, but I bet you won’t be seeing it hit North Korea, any time in the near future.

Share this:

Like this:

Some love affairs make absolute sense however, the love affair Russia is attempting to have with the Taliban by supplying it’s army with weapons, such as but not limited to, heavy machine guns and a small number of surface-to-surface missiles, is somewhat questionable yet not entirely surprising.

Russia’s ties to Afghanistan do happen to go back quite a way throughout history as does Russia’s incessant need to meddle in any affair that they feel would be of a benefit to the Soviet Union and only the Soviet Union.

The Taliban as a group formed around 1979, when feeling an understandable lack of love for the Soviet Union because they more or less invaded Afghanistan.

Funny back story to that is that in 1973 The Soviet Union brought their soldiers into Afghanistan “claiming” to want to rebuild the crushing economy.

However, the Mujahidin which is where the Taliban ultimately rose to life from, were not quite in the mood to have any type of affair with Soviet Union back then.

So as you might imagine some affairs take quite a long time to actually come to fruition. Forget flowers, dinner, wine and mind blowing sex, Russia really had to work for this one to happen, they’ve put in years and years of effort here.

So no, it is not actually that surprising that Russia and the Taliban are actually sleeping together these days. Russia does like to keep its hand in all of the cookie jars, Russia in fact, for lack of better terms, is the whore of the world.

As Russia has continued to fight to have a much better influence in Afghanistan, they simply and quite obviously felt that supplying weapons to the Taliban was a way to accomplish just that. Which in turn clearly demonstrates a pretty concerning pattern with regards to Russia’s desire to influence more than just the 2016 Presidential Election.

Not to mention that Moscow has a pretty rich history of not supporting American influence in Libya, Turkey, Syria and the Gulf to the point of undermining the United States in her effort to curb any and all violence in the region.

Just last year Russia did admit to sharing intelligence with the Taliban in an effort to thwart ISIS, but believing that very nicely packaged, pretty headline is like making a wine purchase because the bottle was pretty.

Russia is, as is the rest of the world a little afraid of ISIS, but for Russia that is because they have not found a way in with ISIS yet, if they had, they’d be sleeping with them too.

Some are wondering what Russia’s real motive is, however that writing is so very clearly already written on the board.

Russia really is playing the oldest game in the book, they are I will admit doing a nice job of it yet it’s not all that surprising or impressive.

If they could manage to “influence” my Starbuck’s card here, I would be more impressed.

Share this:

Like this:

Trump comes up with some good ones sometimes, now he is suggesting that the FBI, Democrats and Russia are co-conspirators.

Which is funny because you simply cannot argue why Russia would meddle in the 2016 Presidential Election, it was not to get Hillary Clinton voted into office, that so very clear.

They were aiming to get a more agreeable and controllable president elected.

It was just a bonus that it ended up highlighting just how divided America is, not to mention it really did bring to surface a lot of problems our country has that we tend to want to sweep under the rug.

One really has to sit down and ponder why Trump would outrageously suggest that the FBI, Democrats and Russia would all somehow get together, make it possible for Trump to win the election, then and this is what gets me, do everything that they can to get him removed from office.

I would really love to be inside of his brain as he puts these thoughts together so that I could honestly gain a better understanding.

Anyway, this is his tweet from this morning:

“Workers of firm involved with the discredited and Fake Dossier take the 5th. Who paid for it, Russia, the FBI or the Dems (or all)?”

In reference to the dossier that a former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele released and take note, not all of the information in the dossier has even been proven to be true, yet some of it actually has been proven to be true.

The FBI did at one point in the fall of 2016 offer to actually pay Christopher to help them in the FBI’s own Russian investigation however, when the dossier was made public the FBI actually pulled the plug on that entire idea.

Trump has always denied allegations in the document that the Russian government has collected compromising information about him and was engaged in an active effort to assist his campaign.

Which by the way he has no bloody proof of himself, so we also have that.

At any rate it’s one of those times when you simply cannot resist calling Trump a moron, or slap him and ask him what he might have been thinking when he sent that tweet, that made him feel any remote possible chance, that it would actually work to his benefit?

Here are the facts, Russia did outright meddle in the 2016 Presidential Election, which really did help with getting Trump elected.

The reasoning behind this is technically yet to be known because I’m looking over at Russia and wondering why this guy, they could have helped any other guy run for office and get elected but this guy?

Maybe to make us suffer?

What makes the most logical sense here though, why would Russia assist with helping Trump win the election and why would Trump argue it with such belligerence that it only highlights his attempts to lie about it.

Furthermore it actually does make the most sense that Russia does in fact have something on Trump that he really does not want the world to know about.

Russia wanted a puppet but they did not count on the job being so full of political red tape so they actually lost what they sought to gain, and left us American’s holding a bag of Trump.

Share this:

Like this:

You know the mainstream media says this every day, especially CNN, “Donald Trump takes to twitter to talk about things that don’t matter in an effort to hide the things that do matter.”

Sorry mainstream media, that is hands down what you are doing here.

A soldier killed in action matters, Trump’s response to it, it doesn’t matter as long as he actually made the effort.

He sucks at words, we all know this.

For an entire 24 hour period I have seen nothing but stories and even some I am pretty sure were not entire truths reported by the mainstream media with regards to Trump’s lack of empathy.

Excuse me, but could I get a show of hands of those that thought he actually had just one tiny ounce of empathy in his body? Anyone???

Trump according to many news outlets was a complete letdown in a phone call to offer condolences to the widow of a slain soldier which has since then, exploded into a sad display that swamped the White House on Wednesday, that ended in the soldier’s grieving mother accusing the president of disrespecting her family and a defiant Mr. Trump complaining that his words had been cynically twisted for political purposes.

Here’s a message to anyone who is getting a tweet, call or letter from Trump, do you bother to read his tweets, he is not eloquent and he is not empathetic.

Period and end of story.

I admit I do not write about too many cold cases that I look at these days but every cop, military member, special agent, that I have spoken to, when asked about getting killed in the line of duty informs me rather proudly, “this is part of the job, it’s what I signed up for.”

Trump is basically repeating what he has been told I am sure countless times.

To the media who is making this into a mountain, STFU already and report news, actual news, not your bloody opinionated, one sided story, but some actual news.

If I am not mistaken, the United States is an entire country, other things are happening here that warrant some attention.

And by the way, this is the very same thing that the Russian’s accomplished with the fake news, the overhyped sensationalism of stories, the fake social media accounts.

Swaying public opinion.

They without a doubt whatsoever learned it from us, our media who has to get every little detail, sensationalize every little story, they learned from us.

In fact this is just like walking up and recording a police beat down without the benefit of having the back story and running with it and suddenly reporting a story about police brutality.

This is bias reporting.

Nice.

As for Trump, I actually support you if you shut down the mainstream media here, I watch it every single day and quite frankly it’s not news, it’s utterly sickening.

Report the news, not opinions, not experts that simply report what they think, because I can do that and a much better job of it, try sticking to reporting just the news.

I am actually quite skilled at forming my own opinion here.

CNN, WAPO, even FoxNews at times, should be labeled opinion pieces and not news.

At the end of the day if you actually watch the news they really reported on vs. opinionated story headlines, they are opinion broadcasts and not actual news.

They do what I do, only not quite as well because I call it exactly how I see it and right now I am seeing Trump’s point to calling them fake news broadcasters.

He is right.

A tag line the news often says, is that they are “reporting news that affects me.”

My message back is that you are not, you are trying to sway my opinion just like Russia is accused of doing.

How can we support imposing sanctions upon Russia for attempting to sway public opinion when we sit back and allow our own media to take an actual newsworthy report and turn it into a circus just to sway public opinion?

Share this:

Like this:

Sometimes I sit back and wonder how some individuals were able to manage to get into office anywhere here in the US, I mean we have a Donald Trump as our sitting President.

I’ve been hearing rumors that some who hold office throughout the United States are pushing for an okay to, hacking, hackers back.

Of all of the stupid idea’s in today’s world, really, this one?

What’s truly worse is that hacking back has been highly discouraged for years, not to mention it doesn’t really do shit to the hacker by the time you’ve hacked them back.

So the idea is that it would clear users to hack the computer that hacked them back.

Not the brightest idea when you consider that sometimes, actually more often than not, hackers are in fact hacking you, from a hacked computer or network of computers.

Computers and networks that belong to innocent individuals and businesses.

Representatives Tom Graves, R-Georgia, and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Arizona are attempting to allow for some exceptions to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the U.S. anti-hacking statute, which pretty much makes it illegal to access computers that don’t belong to you without permission or some form of authorization.

This tweak of the bill would change that restriction and then allow companies to access computers that don’t belong to them in the name of self-defense or, as the bill calls it, “active defense.”

Here is a time when taking the time to bother oneself with your perception of the problem might come in handy because this change is really going to create more issues than it would actually solve.

This change merely changes the situation so as to allow for the hacking, that cycle, to keep going and growing.

These hackers, they are not as stupid as our government thinks either, they could potentially hack someone, write a line of code that would then destroy everything on a network or computer should that victim attempt to hack them back. I mean you don’t honestly think hackers haven’t already thought of this do you?

I can’t write code to save my life here, and I am no hacker here, I can however without a doubt tell you that these hackers have already outsmarted you by about 10 paces if not more.

Except for the Russian hackers, they can hack Hillary Clinton’s email server but they can’t manage to hack my Starbucks card and increase my allotted credit amount for my beloved coffees, which I have suggested many times in the past they do.

The problem is that our own government is not seeing the problem clearly, they are perceiving it incorrectly therefore they are not going to solve it until they do take a step back and start seeing it just as it is.

When you start hacking back, launching DDoS attacks back, releasing malicious malware back, you only keep the vicious cycle going and you create nothing more, than more of an invitation to make the next hack or attack, bigger and better.